Standards Change Request
M.A'Hearn
2004 May 25
Edited by E. Rye 2005 Jun 1

Summary

We are encountering references with excessive numbers of authors and we
request a change to the REFERENCE_DESC standard to make the references
more readily usable.


Current Standard

B.31.5.6 REFERENCE_DESC Components
B.31.5.6.1 Author Names
For the first author only, the surname is given first, followed by
initials. Names of any co-authors appear in regular order: initials
precede the co-author's surname. The word "and" precedes the last
author's name. Do not include white space between authors' initials
(e.g., Kurth, W.S.)
Example:
OBJECT = REFERENCE
REFERENCE_KEY_ID = "KURTHETAL1982"
REFERENCE_DESC = "
Kurth, W.S., F.L. Scarf, J.D. Sullivan, and D.A. Gurnett,
Detection of nonthermal continuum radiation in Saturn's
magnetosphere, Geophys. Res. Lett., Vol. 9, p. 889, 1982."
END_OBJECT = REFERENCE

Proposed change

At the end of the descriptive paragraph, immediately following the
parenthesized example of Kurth, W.S., insert the following sentence:

When the number of authors exceeds five, the author list may consist of
the first five authors' names and initials as usual, followed by "and
N others", where "N", an arabic numeral, is the number of remaining
authors.

Rationale

The purpose of the REFERENCE_DESC is to assist the user in locating
a reference.  It is not to acknowledge everyone who contributed to the
reference.  Nearly all scientific publications now limit the number of
authors to be listed in a citation, recognizing that very long lists
of authors do not assist anyone in finding a reference but rather make
everything anonymous.  The choice of five authors as a limit is quite
arbitrary but within the range of practice at various journals.
Anything in the range of three to eight would be acceptable.

Although planetary science has not reached the scale of high energy
physics, in which an entire journal page is required just to list
the authors, the existence of large instrument teams has already led
to long lists of authors in many references and this makes the
references unwieldy, placing key information such as the volume number
of a journal, very far down in a long piece of text.